King carrots, stately onions and Princess Kate.

The recent sweltering weather and indeed lack of any rain since early March means the pests and diseases will be making an early start so we need to be on our guard. The first wave of carrot root fly should be on the prowl soon so after I'd thinned the long carrots in these pipes in my greenhouse I gave them a spray of Garlic Wonder, as recommended by ex-National champion Ian Simpson. All the long carrots in my drums outside have all germinated well which is the first time in a number of years that I haven't had any cause for concern. I shall now make sure they are kept well watered until they are growing away well, although these in the greenhouse shall be relying on me for water for the duration of their growth.

I shall also be renewing my yearly appeal to you all to get some slug pellets scattered on the sand surfaces of your stump beds and drums of long carrots. The lettuce munchers of the Garden Organic death to all chemical users brigade will have you believe that slugs and snails will not walk across sharp sand. This is bollocks. I've lost many seedlings this way so be warned!

During the course of sieving bags of compost for my long root mixes i'm left with quite a pile of lumps and half-composted twigs that I would normally chuck on the garden somewhere. The compost I used this year was good quality,as were the lumps, being quite small and I felt they could be utilised in a better way.Times are hard! So it struck me to use them in the potting mix for some 250g onions that I am experimenting with by growing them to harvest in 7" pots in the greenhouse in order to improve on the skin finish. Each pot was filled 2/3 with this compost residue, 1/3 soil, plus a handful of vermiculite and a pinch of Tev04. The result was a nice open mix and the onions have grown away well. I'm trying some Red Barion onions this way, some Setton from onion sets and will also do some Vento.

When I went to North Derby DA last week Dave Thornton took delivery of some celery plants from National champion Geoff Butterworth (he can't grow the sods from seed himself). I was surprised to see that Geoff's plants were a bit smaller than my own (below) so I was pleased about that.

Not everything is trouble free however. I've lost a few shallots to some strange maggoty creatures but the same happened last season so I can live with that. I've also struggled to get on top of the white tip disease despite several sprayings with a fungicide. The plants are ok but they look messy and just offend my eye when I look at the row. I gave them a dressing of ammonia sulphate as the more leaves you have the bigger the bulbs should be. I've split the pickling shallots already and the 'exhibition' ones will be done this weekend as they are already starting to burst out of their skins.

This weekend i'm off to Snowdonia for a couple of days of walking with the lads to avoid the Royal Wedding and to avoid a street party and having to mingle and be nice to the neighbours! Still, one good thing is that at least we'll soon be getting a stamp we can wank over! Eh boys? ;o)

Thank God for long Bank Holiday weekends

On Wednesday evening I went to a laugh-a-minute talk at North Derby DA given by John Smiles on the highs and lows of his showing year last season. We all have to accept we'll have many lows during the season and take them in our stride. John certainly looks at life from a 'pint half full' perspective and entertained us for over an hour. North Derby has some excellent speakers coming up including John Branham next month and Sherie Plumb in the autumn.

Thanks to the Royal Wedding we have two long gardening weekends to catch upon all those hundreds of jobs that need doing if we're to be in the cards come show season. Today I managed to get the Mantis on the patch of land i'll be putting my potato bags in the next few weeks. Last weekend I got 70 Sweet Candle stump carrots under the enviromesh covered raised bed.....





....and today I got another 28 in this smaller (but much deeper) bed. These are all with Malvern in mind at the end of September.

Thinking realistically, if I'm to realise my ambition of getting a ticket at National level my best chance will probably be with tomatoes. My first batch of Cedrico have grown very strongly and i'll be looking to get these planted next weekend.

With my various tomato feeds in mind I cut a load of comfrey leaves today and immersed them in water. In a few weeks time I'll drain off the stew and bottle it up ready for use in the summer as a weak potash feed. I shall do the same with some nettle leaves (for nitrogen) later this week.

After a slow start i'm now pleased with my leeks. They are nice and clean and at the size I like to plant out. I'll prepare the bed this week with a good few handfuls of blood, fish and bone plus some seaweed meal and plant them out a couple of weeks later.

The Casablanca spuds that I planted in buckets for a July show are well up. These buckets are now outside but can easily be taken back inside overnight if frost is forecast. Next weekend I hope to be bagging up the Casablanca for the main show season but I really had to get  some on the go to see if all the fuss about them is justified, having never grown them before myself. 

In the greenhouse these stump rooted carrots 'Caradec' growing in pipes standing on the border soil will soon need thinning. I set 3 stations in each pipe as I felt there was room to support three. I'm hoping these 'Gringo' shaped roots will give me a decent set of four for the Millenium Class at Llangollen. I have 42 to choose from. I have wrapped some silver tin foil around the black pipes to deflect light and hopefully stop them overheating or drying out.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to get a couple of drums of long beet up and running. There are peppers to be pricked out,  weeds to be dug up and burned, an enviromesh frame to be made for my long carrots etc etc. I'm a long way off from thinking about my peas for Llangollen but i'm just wondering whether Man Utd's brilliant summer signing and yesterday's match winner Javier Hernandez is a good omen. His nickname is 'Little Pea'. Spooky eh Mr Stocks?

Loughborough!

Let's face it. I'm like the Manchester City of the the vegetable growing world. I make lots of noise and pretend I know what i'm on about, winning the odd class here and there but ultimately, like them, I've won nothing of any worth for hundreds of years. Whether I go on this season and beyond to become like Manchester United, true class not just gobby pretenders, relentlessly winning trophies season after season only time will tell. Or will I crash and burn like Leeds United, consigned to be an also-ran in village shows forever more?



I digress. In this month's edition of Simply Veg the quarterly magazine of the The National Vegetable Society I've had a couple of honourable mentions. However, when I was referred to as 'Simon Smith from Leicester' my wife pulled me up and asked why I didn't say I was from Loughborough? She's worked for the local council for many years and quite rightly is proud of what the town has to offer. So I thought I'd devote this post to telling you all about 'the borough', a potted history in Smithyveg style!


Mentioned in the Domesday Book, Loughborough is a university town (pop: circa 60,000) situated in the River Soar valley midway between the cities of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham, all of whom have shite footy teams a bit like Leeds and Liverpool. Loughborough used to have a football league team many moons ago and its one claim to fame was inflicting on mighty Arsenal their heaviest ever league defeat, 8-0 on 12th December 1896. However, the Arse got their revenge with a 12-0 home win on 12th March 1900 which is also their biggest ever win to date. Strange eh? The site of Loughborough Town's pitch is now the town's leisure centre.



As I said, Loughborough is famous for its university which has educated the likes of Sir Clive Woodward, Rugby World Cup winning coach 2003, Lord Seb Coe (met him once, arrogant twat) and Paula Radcliffe who famously had a shit at the side of the road during the marathon race in the Athens Olympics of 2004. The University complex will actually be the base for the British athletics team during the 2012 Olympics and a striking landmark is the tower (below) which is an accommodation block. Several depressed students have thrown themselves off since it was built in the 60's! Loughborough's residents are known for their constant bleating about the antics of the student population on weekend nights in particular when they get up to all sorts of jolly drunken japes in the wee small hours. There are several streets around the town centre that are known as the golden triangle for owners renting out to the student population, but long-standing local residents do have a bit of a running nightmare during term time. 'Student bashing' was a popular past-time when I was a youth. However, if it wasn't for the university the local economy would be desolate so you can't have it both ways.

Loughborough Grammar School (at which yours truly was educated) celebrated its 500th anniversary in 1995. Boys were regularly caned for misbehaving, we weren't allowed to have long hair or walk on the grass and the assistant headmaster used to conduct regular buggery classes in the boarding houses. I used to have history lessons at the top of this building last lesson on a Friday afternoon!

Until the mid-90's Loughborough was the HQ for Ladybird Books. I doubt there's a household in the land that doesn't have at least one of their books which were produced in their millions on all manner of subjects, occasions and interests.

The world's largest bellfoundry is situated in Loughborough. Taylors Bellfoundry cast the large bells for both St. Paul's Cathedral and York Minster and exports its bells around the globe. It nearly went out of business a few years ago but local enthusiasts and benefactors kept it going, so it wasn't quite a bell-end! Taylors' bells also adorn the local war memorial, or Carillon (below) which is also a war museum and is situated in a very pretty green space known as Queen's Park. It's where the local youth meet up and where my youngest daughter thinks we haven't seen her meeting up with boys on more than one occasion!

Other notable local employers are the Brush Engineering Works manufacturers of locomotive engines, power transformers and generators, and pharmaceuticals giant Astra Zeneca although this is currently being run down for relocation causing several thousand more additions to the local unemployment figures. Until relatively recent times the town was a major centre of hosiery manufacture and in honour of this the local council spent an obscene amount of money on a statue in the town centre called 'The Sock Man' which caused a furore at the time. It's now a meeting point in town ("meet me at the sock man!") but has also caused a few headaches for short people walking into the leg! Drunken middle-aged men have also been known to get quite touchy-feely with it....errrr, so I'm told!

Each year in November the town plays host to a large street fair. The huge rides turn up on the second Tuesday of the month and somehow are all up and running by Wednesday lunchtime, the town centre roads being closed off until Saturday night. I used to love going on the rides until I started working for my current employer, an engineering firm and the fairground people would often bring their bits of ride in for repairs to snapped welds !!

Loughborough is one of the contenders being considered for the award of city status to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2013. It was also the destination point for the very first ever-package tour run by Thomas Cook for a temperance group from Leicester in 1841.



Loughborough can lay claim to many famous local residents over the years. Robert Bakewell after whom a street and school are named is generally accepted as one of the founders of modern farming methods. Coronation Street actor David Neilson (cafe owner Roy Cropper) was born in the town and it was also the birthplace of the 2011 National pea champion. There goes my likeness to Manchester City again!

Hedging your bets!

People often ask me what date do you sow such and such veg if you want them in perfect condition in time for a show on a particular date. Around 1pm when judging commences! The answer can never be a simple one. The vagaries of the great British climate mean no two seasons are remotely the same, even if you manage to fend off all pest and disease attacks. Your watering and feeding regime will vary slightly from season to season depending on your circumstances. And of course we all forget about Lady Luck whose services we need now and again. Some seasons she may give us a huge dollop of luck, and others she's concentrating on helping your competitors, the fickle two-timing bitch.
 
Timing is never really an issue with onions apart from needing an early in the year start in order to give you enough time before the show to get the skin ripened. Shallots harvested in June can be stored in boxes until the week before the show when you can tidy them up and tie the necks. The colour and condition will actually improve as the show season progresses. Leeks will sit quite happily in their beds as long as you give them plenty of moisture and weekly maintenance of the flags and barrels. The long roots can cover a show season from August through to November from a single sowing. Potatoes harvested in July can be shown well into late Autumn if you cut the haulms back and leave the pots for a week or more before emptying out so the skins harden, storing them in dry compost until you need them for washing the day before your show. Even tomatoes can stay firm and fresh looking on the trusses for several weeks since the introduction of vine ripe varieties such as Cedrico.
 
Timing becomes more important for summer crops and legumes such as cucumbers, lettuce, beetroot, french beans and peas. I shall be going into peas in a lot of detail from June as I attempt to bench a set of 12 at this year's National when I will be sowing them 85 days from the show date. With the other crops I find you sometimes need to hedge your bets and sow little and often. Globe beet need sowing about 15 weeks before your show, turnips and lettuce need about 10 weeks, french beans 10-12 weeks, kohl rabi 8-10 weeks, radish 4-6 weeks....in theory. In reality I very often find some globe beetroots will get to size after 8 weeks while others hardly get past golf ball size. Once your french beans are an inch or so long they seem to get to the required length very quickly and will soon go past their best, so you need several plants to choose from and keep picking them regularly to ensure you have plenty to choose from in the two or three days before the show when you can pick when they get to your required length and store in a cool place. If you let one pod go past its best I find the plant is never quite the same again. Lettuce will hold in good condition for a week or two but it's best to sow and grow a tray of a dozen or so every couple of weeks.
 
So, keep a detailed diary, count back from your show date and make sure you sow accordingly, but be prepared to sow another batch a week before and another one a week after if you want to be absolutely sure of having it all right on the night!
 

Stumped for time

Earlier this week I took delivery of a dumpy bag of washed concreting sand for my stump carrot bed and after several days of looking at it I realised it wasn't going to move itself. My garden is over 300' long and the stump bed is near the bottom so it was quite an effort to get this lot shifted......about 20 barrow loads.

Oscar had to come and have a look at what I was up to. One day I'll have to stop him playing in this.

I had just enough to make sure the bed was full. Ideally I would have liked to get this done a few weeks ago so that the sand could settle and then the bed be topped up but as ever time has beaten me.



And so today, as an experiment, I cored half of the bed with a 2.5" dia pipe. I tried this last year with little success as the roots all forked but I'm giving it another go. It's a quick way of rattling through the bed, 'spitting' the collected sand into a bucket from the pipe and filling with your borehole mix. I'm using the same mix as I used for my long carrots. Because coring allows you to get the stations closer together I managed to get 35 in this half, although they were only about 20" deep. In the other half I bored the stations, 24 only, which meant I was able to a wider hole at the top and a deeper one at about 26". All stations had a 2" section of drain pipe over them which should help concentrate water as my problems last season were caused by too little water. When I pulled the carrots I found the bore hole mix was bone dry. After the seed is sown in the middle of each station in a small indentation in the compost, the whole bed is watered well. A pane of glass over each 'cup' creates a mini-greenhouse effect but these will be removed once the seeds have germinated and are growing away well.

Germinating apace

A quick check under the raised bed cover at lunchtime revealed that my long carrots were through 9 days after sowing. The three drums were sown last weekend, giving me a total of 43 potential roots to go at.....hopefully! The only problem I have now is to remember the extra depth I've got the drums at, raised as they are on a wooden frame that I can stand on when tending and watering. A few times now I've stepped back forgetting how much higher they are than last season and nearly broken my neck in the stumble. And before there are any smart-arse comments from the gay Yorkshire brigade yes I am only an Oompahloompah!

31 of my 35 parsnips stations are through, the remaining four have seemingly failed to germinate, so I have set some more seed indoors on tissue paper for pre-chitting. I will also sow some of these in the ground for kitchen use only. I had a cubic metre of washed concreting sand delivered yesterday so tonight I shall be filling up my stump carrot bed as I have used most of the original sand from that for the extra depth in my long root beds and drums. This weekend there will be only 19 weeks to Llangollen and Sweet Candle supposedly takes 22 weeks to stump up properly, that is get the pronounced stump shape at the bottom of the root which is always the last thing to develop on a stumpy. Talking to Ian Stocks yesterday he says he's had them stump in 18 weeks so I'm going all out to get the bed of Candles bored and filled this weekend. I usually get about 60 in this bed, which is no more than paving slabs in concrete on their edges. A photo will follow after the weekend's efforts. I also have a smaller raised bed where I can fit in another 24 or so.

Should the Sweet Candle not make it in time for Llangollen I've set up some pipes in my greenhouse with a trial variety called Caradec and most of these are now germinated. I have three roots per pipe, giving me over 40 potential stumpers to go at for the Millenium Class where you need a set of 4. I shall pull a likely looking Sweet Candle the day before the show, but if it hasn't stumped then I'll leave the rest to grow on and go and pull all the Caradec instead.

And they're off....

On the day my grandson's namesake Oscar Time couldn't quite win me £130 in the Grand National (should've gone each way!) it was good to make the first planting of the season. My shallots went into my raised allium beds towards the edge (to make thinning easier in May) where I'd given a top dressing of blood, fish and bone plus ammonia sulphate (for nitrogen) a week ago. I also planted a few bulbs for the pickling class along the right of the shot. Leeks will eventually go down the middle of the bed.

My parsnips 'Polar' are nearly all through having sown pre-chitted seeds just over a week ago. It's important to keep the top of the drums moist until they're all up and growing away well. Even though I prepared my drums in January and kept topping up with sand as you can see the surface is now a couple of inches below the top of the drum. In the past when I'd filled my drums one weekend and sown the next the surface can end up as much as 8" below where you'd started.

Yours may well be bigger than mine but.....

I take a lot of photos at the shows, not just of my produce but that of other exhibitors also. This serves a few purposes......the main one being that they're nice to look back on during the long winter months when you can't get outside and the show season seems a long way off. It reminds you nearer the time how good your stuff needs to be to get in the tickets, but it can also help you if you're suffering from a bout of self-doubt. A case in point is a photo I took below of a bench full of long carrots at the Malvern Championships in 2008.

The set with the red card against them is far from being the longest. In fact they look as if the exhibitor (can't remember who it was) snapped the whip on one of them just past the main body of the carrot and then trimmed the other two to be the same length, rather than having two so much longer than the rest perhaps? They are also not the heaviest around the shoulder. But they obviously had exceptional condition, colour and uniformity and beat off the rest of the competition. Too often I've seen people look around in bewilderment at a bench full of produce and plonk their exhibit down quickly and beat a hasty retreat, or else not bother at all. But rest assured if you have the three main attributes the judges are looking for you will always be in with a shout, and size carries very few percent of the points no matter whether it be onions, carrots or radishes. It's no good looking on after judging and thinking mine were better than those!

Spud-faces of the World unite

In a case of outrageous anti-Manchesterunitedism the FA today banned King Wayne Rooney for two games. Because of his tourettes syndrome problem he may have uttered a word that little old ladies laugh at when Gordon Ramsey uses it, and yet when Steven 'passback' Gerrard half kills a man in a nightclub and Ashley Cole shoots someone with a gun nothing is done. Hardly seems fair!




It's a good job there are no f*cking disciplinary committees in the f*cking veg world or else my f*cking stuff would never reach the benches, just because I have a spud-face too! And that's all i'm going to say on the matter. F*ck, b*ll*cks, arsehole, shit, fanny, pube!

Stress busters

I went to a talk at North Mids DA on Monday about growing veg in raised beds given by NVS stalwart Mick Poultney. Due to a bad back Mick now grows all his veg in large 4' wide raised beds that he has improved over many years with old horse muck and homemade garden compost. During the one hour talk Mick also told stories about the various people he had fallen out with which seemed to be an awful lot of people. I liked him very much.

A point Mick made during his talk really hit home to me. Mick helps out a friend who works with abused children and a couple of times a week they take them down to an allotment for some gardening therapy. They have found that the kids really look forward to this and have managed to cut down on their medication by up to three quarters, proof if you ever needed it that gardening can seriously take the stress out of life and make you a better and calmer individual. Some of you may wonder what sort of state I'd be in if I didn't garden knowing how f*cked up I am WITH gardening!

Something else I've acquired recently should also help to take the stresses out of my life. I've been given a Mantis Tiller and I had a quick go with it last night on a greenhouse border. It really does churn up the soil and gives lovely friable soil ideal for sowing or planting into. I need never pick up a spade again. Whether the neighbours remain stress-free is open to debate as it is very loud. I've fallen out with just about every neighbour up my street over the years so watch this space!

And one last item on busting the stress in life, this year I'm having to bash my calcified seaweed granules into dust with a hammer for it to go through a flour sieve for my long root mixes. Iain Barbour at JBA potatoes has sourced a calcified seaweed substitute that comes in powder form.

http://www.jbaseedpotatoes.co.uk/hessian-sacks-and-sundries/powdered-calcified-seaweed-p300.html

In Iain's words "Harvesting calcified seaweed is outlawed now but this stuff has all the same ingredients of calcified seaweed but is not made of it. It also has many types of seaweed added and beneficial microbes to boost its buffer ability".

It's good of Iain to go to the trouble of getting this stuff but he'll only stock it if there's a demand so spread the word and order yours for next season!

Pesky Tasco Frisco fiasco!

When I failed to get my favoured 250g onion variety 'Vento' germinated through those satanic ball bearing like seed casings I ordered some 'Tasco' instead from the website of an exhibition seeds supplier that I've used from time to time. They're not my first choice supplier but I've ordered the odd packet of seeds from them in the past with no problems, so I was looking forward to sowing the 'Tasco' as quickly as possible as it's a variety i've grown successfully in the past and I know it can still win on the benches. So I was a little disapponted to receive another variety through the post called 'Frisco F1' as 'Tasco' was out of stock...allegedly! Nevertheless, these were duly thrown into a pot of compost, germinated very quickly and have now been pricked out into plantpak 24's where they continue to make good progress, and even with a late sowing I reckon I can get them to size and ripe in time for Llangollen.
 
The reason I'm confident is that I reckon they're actually Tasco! If you Google 'Frisco F1' on t'interweb you get info on a butternut squash, a tomato variety and even a formula one racing driving called Giles Frisco or something similar. But not a mention of an onion called Frisco. Digging deeper I find that this supplier isn't supposed to sell Tasco despite advertising it on his website. So what do you do when faced with a shit load of seeds you cannot legally sell and face being out of pocket? I reckon these seeds were simply remarketed as Frisco in the hope that no f*cker would be any the wiser. Well they didn't reckon on a nosy twat from Loughborough fingering their little scheme. Let's just say this supplier has previous! The website also lists a 'Favourite' type stump carrot that is set to rival Sweet Candle. But I know of two top stump growers who grew this last season and they ended up looking exactly like Sweet Candle. I don't think they became shit growers overnight somehow!
 
Whilst on the subject of stumps Dave Thornton today informed me he's going to be trialling a new Medwyn introduction called 'Match' which comes from the same stable as Gringo. Gringo used to rule the roost until Sweet Candle came along so it will be interesting to see how 'Match' performs.

First long carrots up and running

It's always a good moment when the long carrots have gone in but it is a lot of hard work and tonight my stomach muscles are letting me know about it. Rain showers meant I was consigned to the garage doing the mixes for most of the afternoon and boring the holes in between them.

Today I only managed to get the holes bored and filled in this raised bed but the mixes are done for three drums that I shall complete during the week. I got 22 holes bored in this bed, doing all the holes first and then going over them again to tidy up any distortions, then filling them with the mix very quickly by using a funnel to trickle it into the holes, slowly at first to ensure no air blocks.

A little tip I picked up from the Ian Simpson talk in February was to put small sections of plastic drain pipe over each bore hole. These serve a couple of purposes....firstly to water into so that the water gets to the bore holes rather than just wetting the sand surrounding them. I think my badly forked roots last season were simply down to not giving the carrots enough water. The second benefit from using these is that you can top up with compost later in the season to avoid greening of the shoulder. A good long carrot tends not to push up out of the compost and if it does it means the root is probably forked, but greening can occur when sand gets washed away from the crown during watering.

With the Millenium class at the National in mind I wanted to get some stump carrots on the go. With 21 weeks to go I was concerned that Sweet Candle would not stump up in time and besides Ian Simpson reckons the colour on Sweet C looks better in the September shows, especially if there is a late burst of fine weather into September.

I'm always looking to try new ideas so I decided to try sowing some carrots in these 18" pipes. I've had these knocking about since I used to grow some parsnips in them for a local show where the judge seemed to prefer squat roots with huge shoulders. I filled them with a mix of 3/4 sieved compost and 1/4 fine vermiculite with added Tev04 and calcified seaweed and just set them on the border soil in one of my greenhouses. I've sown three sets of seeds into each one. The variety is a trial carrot I've been sent called Caradec F1 which looks similar to Gringo and which should grow to about an inch diameter in parallel form, so I don't think growing three roots in each one should be a problem. If it doesn't work out there's nothing lost as they're taking up no room in the greenhouse. I shall wrap some silver foil around the black pipes which will absorb a lot of heat....ok for now but when it gets really hot the roots will likely twist towards the sides and be all shapes.

Covering the shows

March has been one of the driest on record but it has still been very cold meaning kitchen windowsills and the conservatory have been straining under the weight of various seedlings. Now that we've had a few warm days and more are forecast, all of the trays have been moved to the greenhouse. Still keep an eye out on those night temperature forecasts and be prepared to bring in any tender crops once again however. Today I pricked out these Cederico tomatoes as well as some Harlequin small fruited type. Both of these have been timed to be ready for the later shows such as Malvern and Westminster.

My first sowing from the middle of February was potted on into 3" pots and are now looking like this. This will be the last potting for these plants as I expect to be planting these towards the end of this month. From theseplants I hope to be able to get some ripe fruits for the end of August and early September shows.